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from the more-or-less-getting-more-done-with-less-people dept.
Having underemployed workers can lead to two outcomes that benefit an organization—creativity and commitment to the organization—according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Statistics have shown that a significant proportion of workers worldwide are underemployed or working at jobs that are below their capacity. Researchers have estimated that underemployment ranges from 17 percent to two-thirds of the workforce in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the study.
"Our results have important implications for managers," said study co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Managers should not assume that employees will always respond negatively to their perception of being underemployed. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant in detecting perceptions of underemployment among employees.
"When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees' efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks," she said. "Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations."
Not getting enough hours to qualify for benefits is a good thing?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday September 21 2016, @08:34PM
I live in the USA and it tends to mean different things depending on what your job is.
A programmer working on a help desk because there are no programming jobs available is underemployment. However it is hard to analyze. Maybe that programmer is fresh out of school and every company wants 5+ years experience. Maybe the programmer trained in a dead end language and couldn't make the shift. Maybe the programmer is crap and just couldn't cut it.
People like to ignore underemployment stats when calculating unemployment levels. Look at all these jobs! Yeah, they are all part time McDonalds jobs.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 24 2016, @02:23PM
I actually observed this shift, which occurred in the space of about ten years, where I used to live in the SoCal desert. As industry (discouraged away by overregulation and rising costs) and farming (which became untenable after the price of electric/diesel quadrupled and pumping water cost more than the crops were worth) died back, local jobs shifted from full-time and decent wages to part-time jobs at minimum wage with no benefits, entirely in service and retail. Meanwhile an influx of unskilled but willing immigrant labor further expanded the labor pool, and now there was not only underemployment, there was also much heavier competition for what jobs existed, and the cost of low-end housing skyrocketed due to demand pressure. Your choice as a worker became live in poverty, or commute to Los Angeles. Foreclosures on low-end real estate jumped, mainly because the buyer pool had evaporated. So now we had the paradox of newly-poor people trying to sell because they could no longer make their mortgage unable to find buyers because no one who'd want those fixer-uppers could afford them, and a big expansion of mid-range housing being sold to commuters... built where the low-end rental housing was being torn down, further reducing poor-affordable housing. But the subsequent small expansion of part-time and construction jobs was not enough to offset the major losses in industry and farming. The mall chain stores did all right but local businesses dried up. Small business had to let better, higher-paid workers go and hire less-skilled, lower-paid workers just to make ends meet.
Superficially the effect was to make the community appear more vibrant, but only if you ignored the now-higher proportion of poor and homeless and that something like half the working population of necessity commuted to Los Angeles (where they couldn't afford to live). I would have preferred less "vibrancy" and more steady full-time local work. Which ain't gonna happen in a service economy with a labor surplus.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.